It’s Thursday afternoon. Your manager pings you: “when is this email going out? “You say tomorrow, but you haven’t started, you’re fighting fires everywhere. You spend the rest of the day writing it and have to work late again. Friday morning, your boss makes some “tweaks”, and it goes out.
The email is not segmented. It’s not strategic. It is not personalised. It’s not written for the audience.
And unsurprisingly, it doesn’t perform. And you don’t really know why, but email is one of forty things on your list, so you don’t have much time to think about it.
This is what it looks like without a plan.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
What if you always knew exactly what to send and when?
You open a document, know where you’re at in the cycle, know what’s coming next, and why it’s important. Stress-free, you get on with writing and involve only the relevant stakeholders.
This document is your reference point for every decision. You know what’s planned, you know who needs to be involved, and you can push back on a random email ask because it will distract from the strategy.
That’s what the annual email marketing event lifecycle plan and the attendee comms plan are for.
This is the case for an annual event email marketing lifecycle cycle strategy and stop running your event email marketing one last-minute email at a time.
The benefits of having an annual event email marketing lifecycle cycle strategy
Develop your annual event email marketing lifecycle strategy now because having a vision, structure and plan, will make your life easier immediately. Benefits include:
- All of your stakeholders are on board and on the same page, no need to review and re-view things
- Everyone is on the same page about what’s expected from whom and when, no one is surprised or caught off with last-minute requests
- You’ll be able to plan and allocate time for email on a regular basis, allowing you to organise the rest of your work properly
- You have bandwidth to think about the next phase even when you’re in the deep of event prep
- Better content structure, team and content organisation, stakeholder buy-in, and a quicker workflow that you can anticipate and control
The Annual Event Email Marketing Lifecycle
The 5 phases of the annual event email marketing lifecycle
- Sales & promo
- Attendee communication post-purchase
- Live event
- Post-event follow-up
- The Void
When put together into an annual view, it looks something like this:
The length of each phase will vary depending on your sales cycle, how long your post-event follow-up lasts, and other nuances unique to your event. But it always comes back around.
Just before you dive into each, I want to caveat that the below are generalisations and examples. Your event will likely look different because you have a unique audience and business.
Sales & Promo
This is what you’ve probably been focused on the most in the whole cycle. After all, “51% of attendees register for an event after receiving an engaging email” (Eventgroove), and you know you need to send sales emails.
No, email isn’t dead, it’s just poorly executed a lot of the time.
You’ve probably written more last-minute promo emails than you’d like on one of those Thursday afternoons, but you never really have a strategic plan because you’re playing catch-up.
According to the 2025 MailerLite benchmark report, the Entertainment and events industry has on average 46% open rate and 1.28% click rate. Your audience is there and waiting for you to deliver.
The goal: Getting the ticket sales, the bums on seats, the sponsors and filling up the room.
Audience: Ultimately, this is everyone that’s relevant in your subscriber list. This is a wide nest, but not just blanket “everyone”. Some may be more relevant than others, and some will respond best to specific messaging only, you need to know your audience. Which is why segmentation and data are essential in your email marketing strategy.
Best practice: Segmentation is your best friend, be as personalised as you possibly can. You may be selling the same tickets for the same price, but different audience buy for different reasons, so take the time to segment and target.
This phase is more than a sales funnel. You’re building brand recognition, setting expectations, and starting the attendee relationship. The moment someone gets their ticket, they move into the next phase, but how you sold to them shapes their expectations of everything that comes after.
Attendee Communication Post-Registration
This is where the event experience begins. It’s the most important phase of the entire email lifecycle and one that many forget about, but this is where the attendee event journey truly starts.
You’re talking to your most valuable customer: the person who just bought. Now your job is to keep them engaged, excited, and make sure they show up and love the event.
In hospitality, the guest experience begins the moment you book. Every touchpoint is designed with purpose, to create a great experience, and events are no different. Use your emails as an extension of your event experience.
As soon as someone buys a ticket, they enter this phase, may it be 3 months before the event or 3 days. So it overlaps with the sales & promo phase, which is probably why it’s so forgotten.
The Goal: Make them feel confident they made the right decision. Ensure they have everything they need to know: logistics, agenda, what to expect. Make it exciting! Prime them to show up ready and have a great experience.
A well-engaged attendee can also help promote the event, sharing it with others, driving more ticket sales and raising awareness of your brand. This is part of the event experience itself.
Audience: The obvious audience is ticketed attendees, but this phase covers anyone coming to the event in any capacity. That includes sponsors, partners, booth holders, speakers, workshop hosts, and anyone else attending in person or sending members of their team. Think of it as: multiple distinct groups, all under the umbrella of “attendees”.
Best practice: Keep them warm, engaged and excited that they got the tickets to your event! Most importantly, make absolutely sure you are not sending them any other sales emails.
📌 I’ve expanded on how to plan your attendee email comms in detail here.
Live Event
It’s event day, and a lot is going on as usual.
The last thing you have space and time for is writing and sending emails from scratch, which is exactly why the ones that go out are carefully planned and scheduled.
One simple email in the morning of the event tells your attendee you thought about them and their experience. Because you know what they are going through that morning, before they’ve arrived and checked-in.
The goal: Inform. Keep it simple and relevant to the moment. Give attendees what they need on the day: a link to the agenda, a map of the venue, a reminder to be somewhere for a keynote or activity. If you want them to do something, tell them clearly.
Audience: All ticket holders who are supposed to be there. In reality, you may not know who a no-show is, so some emails may still reach people who’re not attending. If you can identify no-shows and suppress them, do it but don’t stress about it.
Best practice: For single-day events, one email in the morning with the agenda link and expectations of the day is enough. For multi-day or very large events, you may want to send reminders throughout the day but be considerate and filter your audience where possible.
Post-event Follow-up
The event is done, and so are you. More emails is the last thing you want to think about, but this is your golden opportunity to truly connect with your attendees.
The in-person experience is out of your control, you can’t manage every interaction they had or how they left feeling. But you can control what happens next: the follow-up.
Because the peak-end rule tells us that the way an experience ends will have as much weight on the attendees’ memory of it as the highest peak. (Nielsen Norman Group) Your follow-up emails are part of the experience.
The goal: Keep the event vibe going. Continue engaging attendees after the event and make them feel the value of having been there, give them something to take away, and set up the next chapter. (You might want to sell them next year’s tickets too, if you do it right.)
Audience: Everyone who attended the event. Ideally, you separate actual attendees from no-shows, this unlocks meaningfully different messaging for each group and makes your follow-up far more relevant and personal.
Best practice: Same or next day follow-up after the event is a minimum requirement to thank your attendees, but ideally you’d have a line-up of 3-5 emails over a few weeks that extend their experience and build connection for the future.
The Void
The event is done, and you can breathe a sigh of relief. Go out and celebrate, grab a drink, and cheers to a successful event!
But don’t relax too much, because now you’ve entered the void: the stretch of time between the end of your post-event follow-up and the moment you’re ready to sell again.
Depending on your event, this could be anything, six months, nine months, or more. This is the longest phase of the entire annual lifecycle of your event.
And yes, you absolutely need to send emails consistently. This is the part where many struggle. Everything evolves around the event, the part in between feels like an opportunity to slow down, but it’s a trap. This is the time to keep going, not at the same pace as pre-event, but you must keep going.
The goal: Don’t lose touch and stay in contact. Nurture the relationship so that when you’re ready to sell, your audience is ready to buy. If you disappear for nine months and reappear with aggressive sales emails, your audience will be suspicious and your deliverability will suffer, landing you in spam. The goal is to avoid actually going into the void, but to maintain a nurturing connection.
“Inbox placement is a result of consistently good habits. From how you collect email addresses to how often you send, every choice you make influences your sender reputation. Stick to a consistent pattern. Sudden spikes, long gaps, or sending to your full list at once can all hurt deliverability.” (Braze 2025)
Audience: This is where you email your whole audience, but this is where segmentation becomes more critical than any other phase. You will be talking to past attendees, sponsors, and everyone else who’s been a subscriber for a while but has not attended, or just joined and knows little about you. They are unique segments. You have to consider them all and treat them differently.
“If you don’t have a solid understanding of your audience or your email strategy, how can you know if you’re spamming someone?” Hollie Light on race directors who only email around race time in fear of spamming lose momentum year-round. (Race Directors HQ)
Best practice: Consistently send valuable and engaging emails to your subscribers that build trust, reputation, and take into consideration their interests and needs.
👉 Get the full breakdown of each phase, what to send, how to segment, what questions your emails should answer and more, download your copy here.
You now know what to do throughout the year, but you probably also have a niggly feeling that something has been falling through the cracks without you fully realising it.
Knowing what to do is one thing, and having the time and headspace to actually do it is another.
You just don’t have the capacity to build an annual strategy from scratch on your own, while you’re in the midst of event prep, agenda planning, and the next email.
So I am here for you if you need help building this for your event, so you can stop chasing last-minute emails and start to be strategic.
Work with me on your event email marketing
I work with event marketers and organisers 1-1 to create strategies for their annual events. Whether you want to start small or are ready to overhaul your whole email marketing programme, I can help you.
My background is in luxury hospitality guest experience, I don’t just “do email”. I understand it’s part of the bigger picture in your business and your event. I treat email marketing as an extension of your event experience, and I develop strategies and solutions that take all of that into consideration. Because it’s not “just” event email, it’s your brand and reputation.
“Maria has done an amazing job in setting up our welcome journey for both our company newsletter signup and also our conference. Our email marketing has never been in better shape.” – Jean-Paul Bayley, Actineo Consulting & Lean Agile London
Maria has helped us to communicate professionally with our very first Conference. She not only gets things done, but also makes sure that we can learn how to do it ourselves as well. I recommend her any time.” – Ziryan Salayi, Organization Agility Coach
“Maria helped to transform our email marketing by mapping out email journeys, segmenting our subscribers into groups and targeting our supporters. She takes the initiative to turn discussions into decisions.” – Kat Khalife, Marketing Manager at Ickle Pickles
Book a discovery call or DM me on LinkedIn and tell me where in the annual lifecycle you’re at and what you’re struggling with.